Note: Cross-posted from Danielmunz.com.
Jon Chait flags an item in the Wall Street Journal about the Obama fundraising machine, or lack thereof:
Teaneck, N.J., lawyer Al DeCotiis says he and a few other Democratic boosters decided a year ago to select one presidential candidate for whom to raise money in the state. The group personally interviewed most of the major candidates, but couldn't get Mr. Obama. "We must have put in five or six calls," Mr. DeCotiis recalls. "For whatever reason, he didn't respond. Then we met with Hillary and we decided to endorse her and work aggressively for her presidency."
I see Jon's point here, but let's start with the facts: Obama raised $25 million this quarter, just-about-matching Hillary's overall total and just-barely-beating her primary total. Moreover, if this were a story about political inexperience, you'd expect to hear about Obama's folks not knowing who to call. Instead, a group of mega-rich donors called him, and failed to get a response, on five separate occasions. Either the fine folks at Camp Obama literally don't know how to operate a telephone, or this was just a deliberate decision not to call DeCotiis & Co. back. In his post, Chait doesn't really address what he thinks the actual story here is, but does muse that, If "these anecdotes [are] typical...I have a hard time seeing how Obama is going to win." Well, I can think of three possible versions of events, two of which I think actually bode well for Obama:
- Obama Got Lucky. Okay, so he had a good first quarter. He's a political rock star with, uhm, fine oratorical skills, obviously a pretty bright guy, and vaguely handsome, to boot. Plus, you have to figure that there's a pretty sizeable anti-Hillary vote out there, and it's not altogether surprising that Obama would turn out to be the financial vessel into which their Democratic hopes and dreams wind up getting channeled. The hysteria may last another quarter, maybe two, but it certainly won't carry him to the nomination.
(Arguably, even this scenario bodes well for Hillary, since Hillary raised considerably less than Obama-plus-everyone-else, and if Obama gets the lions share of donors who become uncommitted as other candidates drop out, he seems pretty well positioned. That said, Chait's article was about Obama's fundraising operation, and if he just coasted on good looks and primary dynamics, it doesn't speak to well of his dial-for-dollars people.
- Obama Was Keeping His Powder Dry. This is just gut intuition, but I'd bet $20 that Obama's huge number of individual donors -- more than Hillary and Edwards combined -- was the single most reported fact of the Democratic first-quarter fundraising news cycle. Before that, of course, the dominant media narrative about Obama largely involved phrases like "fresh face" and "untested," and, rock star or not, no big money bundler wants to phone his 20 richest friends and ask them to give to an untested, fresh-faced candidate. So Obama's fundraising team purposefully hung back during Q1, knowing (or at least hoping) that they could coast through it on Obama's rock star status and come out with enough money -- and enough donors -- to make a genuinely credible full-court press in the following quarters. People don't always want to open up their checkbooks to Mr. Untested Fresh Face, but I bet people get a lot friendlier around Mr. Twenty-Five Million Dollars From A Hundred Thousand People.
- Obama's Going the Dean Route. The most annoying thing about the fundraising game, of course, is that for a week before and a week after the numbers come out, you have to basically glue your eyes to C-SPAN to have any hopes of seeing any discussion of actual policy. I know pundit types like Chait are paid to navel-gaze about the money race (whereas I do it for free!), but if you think about it, I genuinely don't see how stories like this are supposed to hurt Obama with, uh, actual voters. Not to crib from Chuck Schumer, but if the Baileys are reading the newspaper and see a story about some Presidential candidate rudely refusing to return phone calls from mega-rich party insiders, I'm pretty sure that would make them far more predisposed to like that person than the opposite. The small-donor schtick, here, serves as a nifty way for Obama to cut through the ritual deluge of horse race numbers with a very nearly substantive message about his attitude towards the big donors who, for better or worse, seem to have a fairly outsized grip on the contours of American political campaigns. I don't know if it'll work, of course, but it's not a totally insane strategy. (The flip-side of having so many more small donors than Hillary is that relatively few of them will be maxed out in future quarters, building an arguably more stable, if less centralized, fundraising base.) And honestly, in today's media-driven politics, Obama's positive superficial characteristics have to count for something. Imagine what Howard Dean could be today if he had been tall, good looking, highly articulate (there, I said it!) and extremely media-savvy. (Hint: President.) Again, I don't know if it'll work. But it sure makes me want to vote for him.
Two out of three ain't bad, Barack.